Sammy Sosa testifying before Congress in 2005 on steroid use in baseball. Sosa is now up for Hall of Fame consideration. / TIm Dillon, USA TODAY Sports

by Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports

by Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports

A ritual that is as much a part of modern-day Major League Baseball as the seventh-inning stretch, September pennant races and fastballs down the middle begins anew this week.

The hundreds of voters who select the latest members of the Baseball Hall of Fame get to wade through all kinds of information as they make their choices: the career statistics and Congressional testimony of the new candidates for induction, their home-run totals, their federal court documents, and, in one case, their felony conviction.

The Baseball Writers' Association of America once again has the distinct honor and pleasure of picking this cheater over that cheater, or no cheaters at all, for the most esteemed Hall of Fame in sports. The voters have held this particular duty for several years now as the stars of MLB's Steroid Era retired but never went away.

This year, they have a very special treat.

Bonds. Clemens. Sosa. The Steroid Trio. The Three PED Amigos. The boys with the big records and even bigger muscles.

This should be an easy call for the writers who vote for the Hall of Fame. No one should vote for these people. This is Mark McGwire times three. To make it to Cooperstown, a player needs to be listed on 75% of the ballots. Thankfully, McGwire has never received more than 24% of the vote in his six times on the ballot. Last year, it was 19.5%.

That's clearly nowhere near enough, which is fitting for the man who, with Sammy Sosa, perpetrated on the nation the Great Home Run Derby Fraud of 1998. But it leads to a question: Who are these 19.5% to 24% of baseball writers who voted for McGwire -- and presumably will vote for the disgraced Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sosa as well? And what in the world are they thinking?

In criteria sent to the voters annually, there are these words: "Voting shall be based upon the player's record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contribution to the team(s) on which the player played."

I guess if you ignore the parts about integrity, sportsmanship and character, it's fine to vote for the men who have tainted the game and its grandest records.

We've seen some of the writers' excuses over the years, many of them along the lines of that stuffy old standby: "Everyone was doing it." Using that philosophy, these people probably would restore Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson's gold medal from the men's 100 meters at the 1988 Seoul Olympics because there are those who wonder just how tainted that eight-man field was. And let's put Johnson in the Olympic Hall of Fame while we're at it. Hey, everyone was doing it.

One wonders if the writers who vote to honor some of the sports world's all-time biggest frauds have ever tried to explain their decisions to a child. Perhaps they've never thought that it should be a privilege, not a right, to be in any Hall of Fame. Maybe they have misremembered, just as Andy Pettite did.

But not to worry, Bonds himself is here to explain it all. The man who refused to give the time of day to almost any writer is all of a sudden deigning to give some interviews, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that he's on the Hall of Fame ballot that will be voted upon by none other than some of those same writers he loved to snub.

Bonds showed us what we all missed out on during his surly wilderness years, offering gems like this one, according to MLB.com: "Making the Hall of Fame, would it be something that's gratifying because of what I've sacrificed? Sure."

I was trying to think of exactly what Bonds sacrificed during his playing days. All I could come up with was honor, dignity, grace, class and the truth.

Bonds said he respects the Hall of Fame, but doesn't get all the fuss about his possible entry into it. "I don't understand all the controversy we're having about it. For what reason?"

Well, Barry, your head grew to be the size of Vermont. Now that you've been out of baseball for five years, so much of you has disappeared that you actually look like you could almost fit into your old Pittsburgh Pirates uniform. And you're a convicted felon. Other than that, there are no reasons.

Bonds took a rare stand on one issue that's important to him: "I don't want to be part of the kind of Hall of Fame that's based on voters' beliefs and assumptions."

Since that's the only kind of Baseball Hall of Fame there is, here's hoping he gets his wish.